“Give me six hours to chop down a tree,
and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”​

Zweihander opens with a pretty extensive table of contents, which is always good to see. I quickly flipped to the back of the book to make sure they hadn’t tried the old trick of trying to substitute it for an index, but luckily no, an index is there. Something tells me that’s going to be an absolute necessity with this game, so I’ll see if in the course of reading I find any glaring omissions.

Next we have a page of opening fiction. As usual, I skip it. I may someday come back and read it, but short of a republished HP Lovecraft story, at this point in my life the only thing I’m less likely to read than gamefic is a section entitled “What is a Roleplaying Game?”

On the following page, however, we have a section entitled “Designer’s Notes,” which engenders the opposite response. I always love anything that might give me a “behind the scenes look” at the thought process and approach of an author to game design. Generally, these can be incredibly informative windows into what design choices were made and why, and though they show up quite commonly in wargames, for some reason they are rare in RPGs…